Posted on 12/07/2008 6:13:07 AM PST by reaganaut1
SCARSDALE, N.Y. — The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year’s class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon — items not covered by the exam.
A similarly slowed-down pace came at a cost for some students in one of Scarsdale’s Advanced Topics classes in United States history; it was still in the 1950s at the time of the exam, whose main essay question was on the Vietnam War.
Sarah Benowich, a senior, said that the A.T. approach had improved her writing but that she would have liked more dates and facts worked in. Despite studying Advanced Placement exam review books on her own, she still felt “shaky on some of the more concrete details,” she said.
A year after Scarsdale became the most prominent school district in the nation to phase out the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses — and make A.P. exams optional — most students and teachers here praise the change for replacing mountains of memorization with more sophisticated and creative curriculums.
More objective measurements have been mixed, with fewer students taking A.P. exams, and average scores rising in five Advanced Topics courses but dropping in two: United States history slipped to 4.2 out of 5 from 4.4 the year before (Sarah got a 4) and United States government fell to 3.4 from 3.8.
...
Physics students now study string theory — a hot topic in some college courses that is absent from the Advanced Placement exam.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
One of the best ideas I’ve seen floated around.
I'd have to do some research to nail down all the facts, but this story was recounted to me by someone who lived in Scarsdale at the time.
“One of the mysteries to me is why when we teach US History we do not teach enough World History to explain the correlation between the two. What was going on in England and France when the US was fighting the French and Indian War? What happened in Europe just prior to the US Civil War that influenced it?”
The world history you cited focuses on Western Europe, for good reason. The United States is a Western nation whose history is intertwined with England and to a lesser extent the other countries of Western Europe. Acknowledging the special debt that America owes to its English heritage is an offense against multiculturalism and is not politically correct.
My parents are from India. India as a nation dates only to 1948, but the recorded history of people living in what is now India goes back for millenia (as it does for China). However, the history of India and China are less important for understanding American history. That should be obvious, but for many educators that statement borders on “racism”.
An NYT article about the clash over standardized tests is at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507E7D81530F932A05753C1A9679C8B63 , which I found by Googling scarsdale parents boycott standardized test .
We loved to travel from Shrub Oak to Scarsdale to play baseball. Pretty girls, great facilities...money, money, money. It sure beat Shrub Oak. Plus, we won.
Fairfax VA public schools sort of align with your ideas. College-bound students in the sixteen "AP" high schools [there are also eight International Baccalaureate (IB) high schools] can take "honors" World Civ in 9th grade. They spend the year covering up to the beginning of the Renaissance. These students pick up the rest of world history in "AP World Civ" in 10th grade and take the AP World Civ test at the end of their sophomore year. Juniors take AP US History, and seniors take AP Government.
Four Fairfax high schools (all of them AP schools) were just rated in the top hundred US high schools by US News and World Report. That magazine uses methodology developed by School Evaluation Services and criteria include college readiness, proficiency on standardized state tests, and student participation in and performance on Advanced Placement (AP) and (IB) exams.
Thomas Jefferson, a Fairfax County public high school with very tough competitive admission, is ranked #1 in the nation. Of the other three Fairfax high schools in the top hundred, McLean and Langley are in the wealthy part of the county, while Woodson High School has more "typical" demographics and also hosts the largest Special Ed Center in the county. The average number of AP courses taken by all Woodson students by the time they graduate is more than three.
One reason schools are dropping AP courses is because the College Board finally started policing the content of the courses. Many schools were labeling courses “AP” that had nothing to do with AP. The College Board set up an audit process in the last few years. I’m sure many schools find it easier to drop AP and teach “issues” than to follow a rigorous curriculum.
It is certainly difficult to comprehend how anyone could understand string theory without a solid grasp of the revolution wrought by the impact of probability and statistics on physical theory.
bump for later
English lit is finally bull poop. They have us teaching every stupid thing except writing or literature. My friends are showing that idiotic Al Gore movie, and I’m in trouble because I don’t teach speech in my composition class.
If I have one more student tell me that I screwed up grading papers because they took AP classes in high school... I may just go postal.
The money isn’t worth getting out of bed for, and I can make a lot more doing other things. I’m out of here.
As I alluded to above, advertising “string theory” courses is probably just marketing by the school district. But you’re correct about the impact of probability (as part of the quantum mechanics) and statistical physics in the larger scheme of things. All of that requires way more than AP Calc to get by.
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